The Gift as it May

We can sometimes feel that our lives are without sufficient joy.  There might come moments we seek help in our ability to cope with the melancholy.

II.

Alice McDermott's novel After This begins with a young woman, Mary, leaving church.  "In church she had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. ... At least, she had asked - so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously - let me be content." <1>  As it happens, a husband does come into view.  John and Mary Keane are middle-class Irish Catholics.  They live as a married couple in Long Island, and here they will raise their four children, in the America of the 1950s through the 1970s.

The war is over, and as the Fifties pass into the increased permissiveness of the Sixties, there will be new questions for the Keane children and their Catholic faith.  McDermott relates for example Annie Keane's secret trip to an abortion clinic with her high-school friend, Susan Perisichetti.  Susan is pregnant by relations with a former boyfriend, a young man from Queens that she now speaks of as The Jackass.  Mr. Jackass returns to Susan's thoughts in the clinic.  "(You screwed me, you dumped me, I just had an abortion ...)".  A sense of shock and gravity has been building in this chapter, and it is conveyed to us with subtle power through McDermott's brilliant construction of the chapter.  

Jacob Keane is the oldest child in the family, and it is his fate to serve and die in the Vietnam War.  During a hospital visit, Mary Keane sees a woman in a wheelchair who strikes her as "the weary image of every sorrow women knew. ... Were she to bend down and speak to the woman she would say, 'I have buried my child.' She would ask, 'And you?' ". 

Moments of happiness also take place in the lives of the Keanes and the surrounding community, of course, and McDermott recounts such moments as well, with quiet humour and close attention.  "It's a gift, then", remarks someone in the narrative about a young man's talent at the piano.  The remark resonates especially, as those words are the very last of the novel. 

III.

Mary Keane wanted to find contentment in how her life seemed to be turning out.  Mary's engagement with people, and life generally, then increases.  Does that lead Mary to what might be described as contentment?  We have the opportunity to consider that question, and others as they arise, through the understated and luminous art of After This by Alice McDermott.

__________

<1>McDermott, Alice. After This (2006). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.